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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#4

Post by paxys »

Pour one out. While Atom itself was overtaken by a better editor, its legacy lives on in the form of "Atom Shell" aka Electron (for better or worse).

Re: Atom was archived today

#7

Post by p-e-w »

Sad to see this go. I was an early adopter of Atom, and I wrote two extensions for it, one of which while it was still in beta.

The Atom developers made some technology choices that in retrospect were ill-advised, CoffeeScript being the worst of them and splitting everything into dozens of packages a close second. They tried to backpedal on both of these later on, but by that time VSCode, with its far superior engineering built around TypeScript, was rapidly taking over.

Of course, the GitHub acquisition was the last straw, but to be fair Atom was already pretty dead by then.

While the Atom project ultimately failed, it did give us Electron and Tree-Sitter, two technologies that will certainly outlive it.

Re: Atom was archived today

#8

Post by ComplexSystems »

For those looking for a good substitute, I've switched to Sublime Text and so far I've gotten it to pretty much a near-perfect replica of the original. Kind of surprising to me how much of the Atom UI was built to mimic the Sublime interface.

I also tried VSCode, but was never really quite able to get into the interface the same way. For a while I tried customizing the interface with plugins like CustomizeUI, but Microsoft broke those recently, and I've been happier with Sublime.

Re: Atom was archived today

#9

Post by anyfoo »

azhenley wrote: post #5

I had a lot of fun whipping up plug-ins within minutes for Atom! It let me try out ideas very quickly.

emacs may probably let you do this too, and better. The big problem is: You need to know emacs beforehand, which is seriously a lot, and likely bizarre to any modern person. I do, and I will likely never give it up, but I've been at it since the 90s.

In my mind, emacs suffers the same problem as TeX/LaTeX. Some parts of it are very antiquated and just don't fit into the modern world anymore. They'd need an overhaul.

But, that overhaul is hard to impossible to do without losing compatibility. And that compatibility is why you simply cannot replace emacs or LaTeX: There is many decades of features, packages, and whole ecosystems in there. Throwing that away would be a giant loss, people will always continue using it. Other editors can't catch up. Maybe if they survive for ~50 years, too?

Just to drive home how old emacs is: At one point, the popular joke was that emacs stands for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". Yep, 8MB large software was so bloated that it was funny and debilitating.

Re: Atom was archived today

#10

Post by Gigachad »

p-e-w wrote: post #7

Sad to see this go. I was an early adopter of Atom, and I wrote two extensions for it, one of which while it was still in beta. The Atom developers made some technology choices that in retrospect were ill-advised, CoffeeScript being the worst of them and splitting everything into dozens of packages a close second. They tried to backpedal on both of these later on, but by that time VSCode, with its far superior engine…

I started a job in 2018 and someone commented “what are you still on Atom for? Everyone has moved to vs code”. So yeah it’s been kinda dead for a long time now.
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